Free A Geography of Blood by Candace Savage

land that was missing by studying what remained was one of the fine points that escaped me.) As a result of this downgrading, there was a chronological break, or “hiatus,” between the sandstones of the Ravenscrag Formation (the second layer from the top) and the surface that overlaid them. With the aid of binoculars, I could see that the cliffs were surmounted in places by what the field guide identified as the Cypress Hills Formation, a coarse jumble of stones that had washed out of the young Rocky Mountains and been carried eastward and northeastward by great, gnashing rivers during the Miocene era. The disconnect between the Ravenscrag and Cypress Hills formations represented an erasure of about thirty million years. In other places, the round, river-washed stones were missing, and the banks were topped with debris and silt that had been dropped just a few thousand years ago by the retreating glaciers.
    Yet to an unschooled eye, nothing looked amiss; one layer overlaid another in complete innocence. Apparently, an unconformity could exist between the present and what we knew of the past, and very few of us would ever notice it.
    According to Guidebook No. 6, the whole of the Cypress Hills country, including the uplands along the Ravenscrag road, are an “erosional remnant” of a landscape that originally covered the surrounding plains. If the hills now stand hundreds of meters above the prairies, then hundreds of meters of earth must have been stripped away from everywhere else. I once buttonholed a geologist and asked him how something so inconceivable could have happened and where all the lost land had gone. He just shrugged and said that, in theory at least, it had either been carried north to the Arctic Ocean, via the creeks and rivers of the Saskatchewan drainage, or south to the Gulf of Mexico, through the Frenchman and the Missouri river system. That was probably why the hills had survived as hills, he said, because they lie midway between the two oceans, on the divide between major watersheds, and thus have been spared the full, relentless force of erosion.
    Through erosion, the land forgets. And perhaps it was all this talk of remembering and forgetting that sent my thoughts tumbling back to Wallace Stegner again. I was staring out the window one day, idly wondering if that bump on the horizon had been laid down before or after the final retreat of the Bearpaw Sea, when it occurred to me that Stegner had been engaged in a kind of literary and historical stratigraphy. As he compared the heroic myth of the pioneer era with the equivocal data of his own childhood, he had detected evidence of unconformities, gaps between the received version of the settlement story and the reality he had lived. Part of his purpose in writing Wolf Willow, I suspected, was to take a stand against this erasure—to backfill the legend with truth.
    What had he written in? First, failure: “the inevitable warp, as hope was the woof, of that belated frontier.” 2 Second, deprivation: “A dull, dull little town,” he says of the Eastend he encountered in the 1950s, “where nothing passes but the wind, a town so starved for excitement that a man’s misfortune in losing his false teeth in the river can enliven a whole winter’s poolroom and hardware-store conversation.” 3 Finally, his mother’s painful disappointment: “For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it.” 4 It must have been hell on earth.
    Who would have suspected that learning to read the geological strata along the Ravenscrag road, in a halting beginner’s way, would have helped me to perceive new layers of meaning in Stegner’s revisionist history? Yet even as my insight into Wolf Willow deepened and my respect for its author grew, there was still something about the book, something I couldn’t quite put my